David Foster Wallace Quotes

I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt assadness.

I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that...

The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as n...

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and sel...

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, m...

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to wor...

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

A question, doctor," he said. "Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and ...

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which...

What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other p...

For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always...

An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only ...

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literatu...

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my frien...

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he s...

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhi...

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict ...

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that t...

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, ...

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the rea...

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to wor...

For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than s...

Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naiv...

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literar...

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even pare...

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the fla...

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a p...

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ...

You get to decide what to worship.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is...

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical p...

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of...

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of...

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going b...

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally g...

... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always...

You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of...

Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with ...

I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is ...

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other s...

People hate people, not freedom.

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen ge...

Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need ...

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literatu...

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only ...

This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, ...

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture pr...

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on ...

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of cours...

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there...

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cul...

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle...

I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m us...

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital commu...

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. adve...

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every...

And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy charact...

In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivit...

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and t...

In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chap...

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being aro...

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it r...

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was ...

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem ...

AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony wher...

Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, ...

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expres...

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished...

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illumin...

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tric...

Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their pos...

With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re...

And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you...

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it wer...

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. Here was a second right here: he endured it. Wha...

Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children’s Christmas special— Oh, wait, I...

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same...

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

The depressed person was in terrible andunceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing o...

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the diale...

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establis...

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the...

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating...